With the housing crisis still acting as a drag on the nation’s economic recovery, the White House announced a plan today to assist struggling homeowners and address improper foreclosures. The plan, which requires no Congressional action, will reduce refinancing fees for homeowners with government-backed loans, but the plan’s major focus was on helping military veterans who were the victims of foreclosure fraud, predatory mortgage practices, and other improper foreclosures.

Obama outlined the proposals at a press briefing today, where he called it “unconscionable” that military members were among the worst victims of the foreclosure crisis and the fraudulent practices from Wall Street banks that have occurred during it:

We are going to do this on our own. We don’t need congressional authorization to do it. [...] It is unconscionable that members of our armed forces and their families have been some of those most susceptible to losing their homes through the actions of unscrupulous banks and housing lenders.

In 2010, more than 20,000 active-duty veterans and reservists with government-sponsored mortgages lost their homes, a 32-percent increase from 2008 and the largest loss since 2003. The number could have been worse were it not for Veterans Administration programs that helped 66,000 military families avoid foreclosure in 2010.

Even worse, military members are often victims of foreclosure fraud. In November, federal regulators released data showing that more than 5,000 military members may have been illegally foreclosed upon by the nation’s 10 largest banks, and veterans continue to battle banks to stay in their homes on a daily basis.

Obama’s plan seeks to remedy those problems by providing relief to members who sold their homes at a loss due to a permanent change in station, and provides $10 billion from mortgage servicers to bolster the Veterans Housing Benefits Program. It also draws on the recent mortgage fraud settlement between the government and major lenders to force banks to compensate servicemembers who were improperly foreclosed upon by paying lost equity, plus interest, and $116,785.

In addition to the programs announced today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been tasked with making sure military members are treated fairly by financial services institutions, while New York Attorney General Eric Schniederman has launched an investigation into potentially illegal foreclosure practices involving veterans.

Our guest bloggers are Michael Linden, the Director of Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and Seth Hanlon, the Director of Fiscal Reform at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Mitt Romney’s latest tax plan would reduce federal revenues by more than $6 trillion over the ten year period from 2013-2022, and that’s on top of the more than $4.5 trillion cost of extending all the Bush tax cuts. But Romney insists that his tax plan will not add to the deficit. He claims that a mixture of “stronger economic growth” and “base broadening” will make up for the lost revenue.

So, just how strong would economic growth have to be to make his plan add up?

The economy would need to grow at a real rate of 6.8 percent every year for the next five years! In other words, without additional measures to raise revenue, the only way Romney’s tax plan will raise the same amount of revenue by 2017 as the current tax code would, is by having the economy go on an unprecedented tear like nothing this country seen in generations. 6.8 percent real growth for five straight years is “implausible,” to say the least.

To put that in perspective, the Congressional Budget Office currently projects that the economy will grow by an average of 3.3 percent annually over the next five years. The very best five year period in American post-war history was from 1961 to 1966 when economic growth averaged 5.8 percent. Former Romney opponent and now Romney-backer Tim Pawlenty’s economic plan relied on consistent 5 percent real growth and he was basically laughed out of the room for making such outlandish assumptions.

Of course, Mitt Romney has also promised to “broaden the base” by eliminating or limiting some tax breaks for the wealthy, while leaving those for the middle intact – though he has yet to identify even a single specific one.

But even if we take Romney at his word, the math still doesn’t work without enormous and unrealistic economic growth. Limiting the value of tax expenditures for those making more than $250,000 would generate between $40 and $50 billion in 2017. Romney would still need five years of 6.5 percent real growth to make up the rest. Even completely eliminating all of the major tax benefits for those in the top 1 percent except for the special rates on investment income – which would generate around $150 billion – would still leave Romney relying on five years of 5.8 percent real annual growth. In fact, anything under $275 billion in base broadening for 2017 would require 5 percent real growth or better to make the numbers add up to the same level of revenue as current policies would generate.

“Offering gimmicky proposals that rely on implausible levels of economic growth and blow huge holes in the budget is easy,” Romney said. He might have continued with, “Now let me show you how easy.”

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According to the latest Census Bureau data, nearly 50 percent of Americans are either low-income or living in poverty in the wake of the Great Recession. And a new study from the National Poverty Center shows just how deep in poverty some of those people are, finding that the number of households living on less than $2 per day (before government benefits) has more than doubled in the last 15 years:

The number of U.S. households living on less than $2 per person per day — which the study terms “extreme poverty” — more than doubled between 1996 and 2011, from 636,000 to 1.46 million, the study finds. The number of children in extremely poor households also doubled, from 1.4 million to 2.8 million.

While extreme poverty doubled overall, it tripled amongst female headed households. Of course, there’s always the tact taken North Carolina Republican State Representative George Cleveland last week, who simply denied that anyone in his state lives in extreme poverty. As we noted at the time, “the 728,842 North Carolinians who are classified as living in deep poverty might take issue with that assessment.”

Our guest blogger is Paul Breer, a former ThinkProgress intern and co-creator of PonySavers.org.

Last week, ThinkProgress reported studies by political science professors Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal that show House Republicans are largely responsible for the ideological extremism that has occurred over the last 30 years in Congress. Another study by Poole, Rosenthal, and others finds that as the proportion of income made by the top 1 percent has increased, members in the House have become more “polarized.”

Combining the two studies, meanwhile, shows that as the income of the 1 percent rises, Republicans become more polarized by moving further to the extreme right. The data sets affirm what we already know: the GOP is beholden to the interests of the 1 percent.

Poole and his colleagues explain this phenomenon by proposing that the top 1 percent tend to be highly partisan. As the income for the 1 percent rises, their campaign contributions become more partisan as well. This polarized campaign-giving has clearly contributed to the ideological extremism of the GOP, while the same type of donations have made only a negligible difference in the Democratic Party’s ideology.

Yet Republicans continue to ignore that America is now more unequal than Iran, Uganda, the Ivory Coast, and even Ancient Rome. And more to the point, as the income of the top 1 percent has seen a 275 percent increase from 1978 to 2007 (compared to a mere 18 percent increase for the bottom 20 percent), Rick Santorum says he is “for income inequality” and Mitt Romney attacks people who raise these facts as engaging in the “bitter politics of envy.”

Last week, with a lot of help from the Roosevelt Instutute’s Bryce Covert, we looked at how access to contraception has benefited the economy, as having more women in the workforce significantly boosted U.S. GDP. In fact, according to McKinsey, the increase in women’s workforce participation since the 1970s has grown the economy by 25 percent, “an amount equal to the combined GDP of Illinois, California and New York.”

Today, the New York Times’ Annie Lowery points to a study by researchers at the Universities of Michigan and Virginia which found that access to contraception also helped close the gender pay gap:

A study by Martha J. Bailey, Brad Hershbein and Amalia R. Miller helps assign a dollar value to those tectonic shifts. For instance, they show that young women who won access to the pill in the 1960s ended up earning an 8 percent premium on their hourly wages by age 50.

Such trends have helped narrow the earnings gap between men and women. Indeed, the paper suggests that the pill accounted for 30 percent – 30 percent! – of the convergence of men’s and women’s earnings from 1990 to 2000.

But of course, the pay gap persists, despite measures passed by the Obama administration to help address it. In 2010, women’s wages were about 77.4 percent of men’s, and the gap is even larger for African American and Latino women. Women make less than their male counterparts in all 50 states, with Wyoming having the worst disparity, at 63.8 percent.

As ThinkProgress’ Travis Waldron noted, “because of the gender pay gap, women with the same education doing the same job as men earn far less over their working lifetimes. The wage gap costs $723,000 over a 40-year career for women with college degrees. In some industries, the gap can cost women close to a million dollars.” So while access to contraception and family planning has certainly helped, there’s still a long way to go to ensure gender equality in the workplace.

As Stateline reported today, former Reagan supply-side economics guru Art Laffer (who has had an unkind word for ThinkProgress from time to time) is working with GOP governors in several states on tax cut packages. Laffer is going from state to state insisting that, despite the fact that states are still grappling with the low revenues and budget cuts that followed the Great Recession, lawmakers should be cutting their taxes to spur economic growth:

From Florida to Kansas, governors have embraced Laffer’s theory that if tax rates become too high, they lead to less, not more, tax revenue…Laffer’s work is being touted in tax-cut campaigns not only in Kansas, but also in Oklahoma and Missouri as a brief for drastically reducing the state income tax or eliminating it altogether. He has visited all three states recently in different capacities to discuss research he says shows that states without an income tax generally enjoy stronger economic growth…Laffer also served on Florida Governor Rick Scott’s tax advisory board. He worked with Ohio Governor John Kasich last year to abolish the estate tax, and is doing the same now in Tennessee.

Comparing the Bush era (when taxes were cut) to the Clinton era (when taxes were increased on the wealthy) in terms of economic growth should have put Laffer and his supply side theories to rest. However, he is clearly still going strong. But as the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy pointed out, Laffer’s new “research” showing that states should cut their income tax rates to spur growth is little more than snake oil:

While the results are no doubt attention-grabbing, the underlying regression used to produce them is deeply flawed. For starters, the analysis uses a misleading measure of “tax rates” that includes federal rates, thereby distorting what is intended to be an analysis of state tax policy and economic performance…Furthermore, 2002 was by far the worst year for U.S. economic growth in the eight-year period in the analysis, and 2001 also saw low growth nationally. Following the deep post- 9/11 trough, personal income predictably grew at a relatively fast rate, just as cuts in federal tax rates were coincidentally going into effect. By creating a bogus measure (federal and state tax rates combined) and mapping it onto an exceptional moment in economic history, Laffer creates the illusion that cuts in state tax rates between 2001 and 2003 fueled economic growth later in the decade.

As ITEP’s Carl Davis wrote, “the bottom line is this: no-tax states aren’t booming, and lawmakers should not expect their states’ economies to improve if they join the no-tax or low-tax club.” Former Wichita State University economics professor William Terrell called Laffer’s work “empty,” adding that it’s “amazing” that states are taking his work to heart.